Endless Summer of Preserved Abundance

What if life was an endless sweet summer, with fruit trees forever bearing apricots and peaches, wheat stalks always heavy with grain, and fresh herbs growing every day of the year? What if the air was always fragrant with jasmine and gardenia, and all of humanity was forever young and strong?

Would it be a perfect world or a boring world? In any case, real life is definitely not so! It is of yin and yang, night and day, alpha and omega — and summer and winter. Not unlike other regions of the Mediterranean, the Lebanese have an answer for this age-old dilemma. What some cultures call a pantry or a cold cellar we call a mouneh, and as the weather grows colder it becomes the ultimate food promenade in the comfort of your own home.

In Lebanon, the word mouneh refers to a significant aspect of our food history and culture. It alludes to the bounty of the fields and the delights of kitchens across our small nation, of produce preserved in jars, bottles and bags. Wheat, burghol (cracked wheat), grains, beans, pickles, jams, dried fruits, keshek (a mixture of yogurt and burghol, fermented then dried — similar to Turkish tarhana), potato, onion, garlic, olive oil, olives — all the required ingredients for meals during the cold winter months, when nature is sleeping, the snow in the mountains is high and roads to the cities are often challenging.

Mouneh tradition is less important in cities, where souks make food and fresh produce more available. Nowadays, this tradition is more of a beautiful nostalgia as ingredients are flown from all over the world, vegetables are produced year-round in greenhouses, and freezers try to preserve the rest.

Mouneh season is one of abundance — summer and fall, a perfect setting for La Cigale et la Fourmi, the French fable that tells of a cricket who sang all summer while her neighbor, an ant, worked and collected food for the winter. It is about how to keep and save this abundance, for scarce winter days.

An important part of the Lebanese home is the oudet el mouneh, which is often a cellar or a pantry near the kitchen, sometimes an attic (but rarely, because it would be too hot in summer).

Old Bekaa mud houses, simple peasant homes of one or two rooms, had mouneh conserved in containers that were built in the walls, called kwara or khazneh — the latter meaning a “safe,” as in protecting the most precious grains and beans.

My childhood mouneh memories are of my father going off to olive groves in the north to choose his olives, take them to a mill, and wait for the freshly pressed olive oil. He used to order a two-year supply every second year, as olive yields and quality are better every two years. Oil was stocked in huge clay jars, the same ones that our parents and grandparents used for generations before us.

My grandfather used to buy potatoes from the area around the town of Tannourine; these potato fields were high in the mountains. He would get enough for a full year’s supply for five households, his own and those of his four children. He did the same for onions, garlic, burgol, kechek, jams, pickles, dried vegetables and compotes. Full shelves were cleared through the winter months and as spring arrived, room was naturally made for fresh produce.

A wise old mouneh proverb is about the “right measure”; how to stock enough to last until the next season, and not a grain more. It is said that mouneh gets spoiled when the new harvest comes. Therefore, the right measure from year to year is essential. Not too much, not too little.

Mouneh is a personal passion of mine that was inspired in part by a book, a specialized study on this subject by anthropologist, Aida Kanafani Zahar. This book is now my bible. It was love at first sight. Aida describes mouneh as “an art that requires science and ability, precaution and judgment, order and taste.”

Youmna Jazzar Medlej recently wrote a wonderful children’s book about mouneh entitled The Days of Mouneh. Youmna tells of Lebanese children’s traditions in her wonderful books, which she writes and her daughter, Joumana, illustrates. The Days of Mouneh begins with two children, Mounya and Walid, arriving at their grandmother’s house for the ritual Sunday lunch, to find her in the kitchen amid a crowd of jars and bottles. These are images that remind us the way that food can be such a cultural bonding agent.

Preserving abundance is about preserving life. As Aida Kanafani Zahar says, “Mouneh is the taste of life!”